This week I came home to discover a huge box from Amazon waiting for me on my porch. When Daniel got home I opened it to discover the new Beatles RockBand inside. Inside were a faux Hofner Beatle bass guitar, four drum pads with a bass drum kick pedal, and a USB microphone on a stand. Hmm, no guitars for John or George, nor more mikes. I guess they want people to share the microphone like Paul and George used to.
As someone who can play almost every Beatles song on the guitar or the piano, I was skeptical at best that this would be a rewarding experience. Sure, I’m as happy as I was when the film “Across the Universe” came out a few years back and converted millions of teenage girls into Beatles fans, but this device promised to actually get people to play and sing — not just listen on their iPod.
We unpacked the box, put in batteries, Daniel put together the drums, and I strapped on the bass, offering to sing and play bass for “Twist and Shout.” The more I thought about it, I cut back to just bass until I knew what I was doing. A video introduction started to get us psyched to start playing. Then the song started. Had I had a regular bass, I would have started and matched the music perfectly, but what the hell were these colored images streaming at me?? Oh! Those are notes, and they are color coded, and when they move past this line I’m supposed to do something. Totally flustered I tried to figure it out. The neck of my guitar has five colored thingees where the frets are, and they correspond to the colored bars coming at me on the screen. They didn’t correspond to high or low chords, or tonic, subdominant, and dominant, they just meant CHORD CHANGES: PLAY! So I gave up my years of notational experience and went with the flow, playing a red plastic button when the red bar went across the line on the screen, and ditto with the yellow, green and blue bars. I was starting to get it.
Daniel, who had previous experience with RockBand, was flailing away on the drums like a pro. I felt like an idiot. It reminded me of that moment when the original members of Kiss tried to play their own songs using RockBand without much success while Gene Simmons’ son was the pro. Eventually, I started to figure it out. My brain made the switch to a new notational reality and “got it.” My refined sense of harmony took a backseat to the plastic five color keys on the neck of my Beatle bass and I had to just get over it.
Daniel then encouraged me to sing a song, which I did pretty well. One gets ranked by the number of correct notes one sings. Later on we performed “I Am the Walrus.” I have to say I was very proud to have a husband who earned a 99 percentile in the HARD mode singing that song. Wow!
We will probably add another guitar or two, assuming our friends decide this is a fun social thing to do. The makers of the program were smart in only releasing 50 songs so far; more will be added as time goes on, like software upgrades. I like the social aspect of this trend–not so far from sitting around the piano in the late 19th century singing parlor songs after dinner. Except we are singing, er, screaming: SHAKE IT SHAKE IT UP BABY NOW, SHAKE IT UP BABY, TWIST AND SHOUT!
Every once in a while I get a hankering for Swedish crepes at IHOP. The servers are beyond friendly, ready to do anything to make you happier and fatter.
I love the one in my neighborhood because it’s the one where the Buffalo Springfield was formed. And I think, “hmm, did Neil Young and Stephen Stills sit at this booth once? Did Richie Furray and Dewey Martin laugh and eat pancakes at this table? Did Bruce Palmer sit alone at this table?
What time of day did they come in? Were they all smoking? What were they wearing? Did they laugh a lot? Did they sing to each other? How old would you say they were?– I ask these questions to my imaginary guide to this Historic Hollywood Hangout.
More coffee please.
Here is a video of a 1967 performance in Monterey of the Springfield’s biggest hit, “For What It’s Worth”. David Crosby is playing along. I don’t see Neil Young or Bruce Palmer. Richie Furay is looking exceedingly preppy and perky here.
After going through several rooms filled with musical instruments, we have discovered a wide variety of instruments in various conditions and of widely varying value. I was deighted that several instruments previously thought to have been missing were found.
This week we found a blue baritone saxophone. It will go with the milk green UCLA Les Paul guitar that we found this summer. We found a Wagner tuba in fairly good shape and two more that had been poorly repaired decades ago; a rediscovered a set of instruments given to us by the late Jack Lord (Hawaii Five-0), including 3 old Martin guitars, 3 old 4-string banjos, and 2 wonderful old mandolins–a “The Martin” and a Washburn; a treasure trove of historic autoharps; and a number of clarinets that even our clarinet teacher didn’t know about. As I reported a few weeks ago, going through all these instruments with the faculty has been like going through your grandparents’ attic. Everyone loved it.
As I reported these wonderful finds to the faculty in our meeting yesterday, I saw the voice faculty looking glum. Michael Dean spoke up: “Did you find any tenors?” The faculty roared with laughter.
Jennifer Snow and I went to the grand opening of Steinway & Sons new west coast store in West Hollywood (call it Beverly Hills adjacent) last night. It is in an amazing neighborhood and is a wonderful store. There is a loft upstairs that functions as a little concert space. We visited with the store owner, Gavin English, who is very excited about the store and being a new Angelino. Ron Losby, the President of Steinway, USA, was there feeling a bit homesick for his old stomping grounds. I comforted him by saying if he ever retires, I’m sure LA would welcome him back.
The store was filled with all kinds of pianists from all over Los Angeles, all looking vaguely familiar. There was champagne and tasty wine for all.
After the ribbon cutting ceremony, Gavin welcomed and thanked everyone, then introduced his long time colleague, David Benoit who played two numbers. The first was a lovely, catchy love song for his wife. The second was a tribute to Dave Brubeck, who just turned 88 yesterday (”an appropriate age for today”) and played a kick-ass up tempo rendition of “Blue Rondo a la Turk.” I was in heaven. Benoit, with his impressive white grey hair, almost looked a bit like Brubeck.
I only regret that I didn’t get to meet the gentlemen who owns Steinway, who was skittering around the store the whole time looking wonderfully eccentric, and a bit like Truman Capote.
A lovely event.
School started with a bang at UCLA.
The first day featured a faculty strike, with students and staff encouraged to join in. Robert Winter put it succinctly: “I’ve waited for 25 years to teach this class; you think I’m gonna strike?” — this referring to our new first year core course offered for the first time. This term I am joined by Robert Winter, as well as ethnomusicologist, A.J. Racy. All majors in performance, composition, music education, music history, world music, and jazz are required to take this one year team taught class. (By the way: we didn’t strike, nor did the students.)
On the first day, Winter set the tone for the course, explaining what were about to do, and setting the ground rules for the course. They, I coordinated a “getting to know you” session. Each student said: “My name is [their name], I play the bassoon and I am from San Francisco. An interesting thing I’d like you to know about me is [I am an Ultimate Frisbee expert].” We got through 90 students, the TAs and the teachers. Then the class closed with AJ Racy who will continue his talk on Tuesday.
On Saturday night, I hosted a party for the three music departments. A good group showed up and we had a blast. The young’s and a few oldsters as well, played Wii downstairs. Lots of cross departmental zapping occurred which is always a good thing.
Today, I ran the combined musicianship classes while the TAs worked to divide the 90-some students into six sections, each one divided by musicianship ability. We tried this for the first time last year and it worked quite well.
As I mentioned a few weeks back, I have been going through our considerable collection of musical instruments with our performance faculty, evaluating which ones have curriular value, which ones can be used by our Music Fundamentals in Music Education classes, and which ones are valuable and should be sold. Everyone has enjoyed the “going through the attic” experience, expressing surprise as they find some real treasures.
It is thrilling to see supercharged, ready-to-teach teachers, and the excited students ready to learn. No one is thinking about the terrible California budget; the educational process is alive and well at UCLA, and we are thrilled to be a part of it.
I spent a total of three days this week going through old musical instruments in three different rooms at school. We were dumbfounded to find the most amazing instruments: viols, sackbuts, shawms, recorders, and many other well-known early music instruments, but the most amazing discovery was a Cecilium. The most lovable, if not slightly homely instrument I’ve ever seen. It’s a cross between an harmonium, a proto-accordian, and a cello (sic). I found an image of one, but ours is actually a bit older. There were only 310 of them made, and ours was likely one of the earliest. Here is a French video of one. (You have to wait through a minute of reporting.)
In another room, I went through our extensive violin, viola and cello collection and found quite a large number of 17th and 18th century instruments whose value has likely appreciated. Although we have an inventory of most of the instruments, there were some beautiful instruments, new and old, tucked away in corners, behind boxes, hidden in locked cabinets, that were unidentified and not in the inventory. I am no expert or conservator, but one of our staff members who has expertise, and I have carefully locked them away in a humidity-controlled room. We will be hiring a museum scientist to go over all these beauties and advise us on their condition and worth. You can imagine what a joy it has been spending time with these beautiful old instruments. And who knew that being a Chair could occasionally be like a Hardy Boys episode?
Scott Spiegelberg has turned over ranking the top Classical blogs to invesp consulting. They track thousands of websites and blogs for all areas of interest. They have an ongoing page that tracks the second by second rankings of classical music blogs. invesp.com tracks blogs using a long list of criteria:
* Classical Music Blogs: The ultimate rank * Classical Music Blogs: by Feedburner RSS membership* * Classical Music Blogs: by unique monthly visitors * Classical Music Blogs: by Yahoo indexed pages * Classical Music Blogs: by Google indexed pages * Classical Music Blogs: by number of incoming links (via Yahoo) * Classical Music Blogs: by the ratio of incoming links to numbers of pages * Classical Music Blogs: by pages per visit * Classical Music Blogs: by Google PR * Classical Music Blogs: by Technorati rank * Classical Music Blogs: by Alexa rank * Classical Music Blogs: by Compete rank * Classical Music Blogs: via Social sites
They limit themselves to the top 25, and even though I didn’t make “the ultimate rank” this blog pops in and out of several of the categories. In fact I was number 1 for a few days in the Technorati ranking — a dubious achievement, and not quite sure what it means.
I was saddened to see that two blocks from my home, the last sheet music store in Los Angeles, Hollywood Sheet Music, has closed its doors. Petelson’s days are numbered, so I hear. (Can’t they just move to an online business??)
With Ralph Jackson and Mark Carlson at lunch yesterday, we wondered about the future of sheet music. Yes, musicians will now get their sheet music online. UCLA bought some music tablet screens as sheet music replacements a few years back, where music (PDFs) is downloaded into the device. We couldn’t get anyone to use them. Nonetheless, something like this will exist in our future. Choruses and orchestras can’t handle the huge amount of sheet music that amasses as the years go by. One chorus I know of (over 200 members), will destroy 196 copies, keeping four, and reprinting when needed.
I decided to buy the new, larger Kindle from Amazon.com. I’m going to try out NOT having a physical book. I know, this is a huge paradigm shift, but I think I’m ready.
I am having a hard time switching over to music-as-download mp3s. I find I still want some THING in my hand that tells me who wrote what and who is playing on what and the what the names of the songs are, and what the lyrics are. I know: it’s old school, and I need to get over it.
The move away from information as a THING as opposed to something invisible that is downloaded to your PC or hand-held device, can be challenging.
This all came to mind as I was thinking about buying WEST SIDE STORY. The image that sprang into my mind initially was holding that red LP, turning it over; and then POP. Oops. I meant CD, but CDs seem to be fading, sooooo, mp3s? And nothing to hold and look at. Just listen. Hmmm, maybe that ’s not so bad.
I applaud the increase in excellent program notes that some record companies are providing with online album purchases. I don’t see what ALL CD makers don’t embed copyright info, as well as program notes and credits in every song. Some do, many don’t.
I am finally reading Oliver Sacks’ terrific MUSICOPHILIA. It has truly been a life-changing read. In it, he discusses musical hallucinations. I had always assumed that everyone had a constant playlist going in their heads as I do, but I guess not. My brain is full of earworms as well as an enormous playlist of songs and pieces of music that never stop. It gets in the way of my reading, going to sleep, sex, and most things that require concentration. I now know that my condition is rather unique and incurable.
When I am composing, whatever I work on plays in my head constantly. When I get to know a piece of music or a new song, it’s in my head constantly. Evidently, I’ve got it easy: some people have their internal radios going at full blast. Mine is softer, so that if there is talk, music, or white noise, I don’t hear it as much. Some people’s musical hallucinations do slice and dice to songs and they have chunks from different songs that get all jumbled together.
I roared with sympathetic laughter reading about one poor woman who gets an annoying earworm where she hears DING DONG DING DONG (where the DONG is a fifth lower) that repeats over and over for hours. Poor girl. My most annoying earworm is a fragment from Stravinsky’s FIREBIRD that loops and loops and loops and never resolves.
I recommend this book to all, but especially musicians.
It occurred to me to look back at the top selling singles from the past 60 years in increments of 10 years. I’ll bring this to my class and use these songs for analysis and discussion. Questions: why do you think this song was so popular? What is unique about this song? What is the song structure? Is there anything harmonically or melodically unusual or eccentric in this song? Can you dance to it? Could it be Muzak? How are these three songs different than the songs from 10 years ago? [rankings from Billboard and other sources]
Top Songs of 1959
Johnny Horton – “The Battle Of New Orleans” Bobby Darin – “Mack The Knife” Dave Brubeck Quartet – “Take Five”
Top Songs of 1969
The Archies – “Sugar, Sugar” The Fifth Dimension – “Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In” The Beatles – “Something”
Top Songs of 1979
The Knack – “My Sharona” Gloria Gaynor – “I Will Survive” The Clash – “London Calling”
Top Songs of 1989
Madonna – “Like A Prayer” The Cure – “Love Song” The B-52’s – “Love Shack”
Top Songs of 1999
Cher – “Believe” Backstreet Boys – “I Want It That Way” Eminem – “My Name Is”
Top Songs of 2009
Kelly Clarkson “My Life would Suck without You” Black Eyed Peas “Boom Boom Pow” The All American Rejects “Gives You Hell”
